Raymond Chandler Quotes

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Raymond Chandler

Profession : Writer

Birth : July 23, 1888

It is not a fragrant world.

Raymond Chandler

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

Raymond Chandler

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Raymond Chandler

Alcohol is like love. The first kiss is magic, the second is intimate, the third is routine. After that you take the girl's clothes off.

Raymond Chandler

Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.

Raymond Chandler

The more you reason the less you create.

Raymond Chandler

It is pretty obvious that the debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of fraudulent advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.

Raymond Chandler

An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.

Raymond Chandler

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

Raymond Chandler

A really good detective never gets married.

Raymond Chandler

The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be.

Raymond Chandler

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.

Raymond Chandler

The challenge of screenwriting is to say much in little and then take half of that little out and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.

Raymond Chandler

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Raymond Chandler

I guess God made Boston on a wet Sunday.

Raymond Chandler

Good critical writing is measured by the perception and evaluation of the subject; bad critical writing by the necessity of maintaining the professional standing of the critic.

Raymond Chandler

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

Raymond Chandler

The streets were dark with something more than night.

Raymond Chandler

I think a man ought to get drunk at least twice a year just on principle, so he won't let himself get snotty about it.

Raymond Chandler

The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

Raymond Chandler